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Guide to Resolution Writing
A resolution is a proposal which outlines what you think your country would do in order to solve certain issues. Remember, above all things, you are a representative of your country and you must put forward the appropriate views. In some conferences you will be asked to prepare a resolution in advance (with your adviser's help if needs be), whilst in other conferences, the resolutions can be built from scratch. Resolutions will be debated by fellow delegates and voted upon. Format Resolutions are made up of clauses. The clauses are divided into two sections: Preambulatory Clauses and Operative Clauses. The Preambulatory try to outline the issue that is being discussed, and draws attention to any previous attempts and efforts to solve it. The Operative propose the solution that your country has decided upon. A Resolution should be able to be read as a single sentence. *Resolutions always begin with four headings: ::Committee: - write your committee name, be it Political, Economic and Social, Ecology and Environment etc. ::Question of: - the issue that you are debating, as it appears in the conference's agenda. ::Submitted by: - the country that you are representing (not your name). ::Co-submitted by: - leave this one blank. Other countries that merge with, or support, your resolution will add their names here. *The headings are followed by your clauses: ::Preambulatory Clauses - each clause should start with a capital letter and end in a comma. Leave a line between each clause to make them easier to see. ::Operative Clauses - again, each clause starts with a capital letter, but this time should end with a semi-colon. Each clause should be numbered. ::Any subclauses should be lettered (a, b, c, d, etc.), start with a lower-case letter and also end in a comma. *You can number every line of your resolution. *Certain conferences may have rules about the maximum number of clauses that are allowed in a resolution, or the minimum number a resolution should have before it can be allowed into a committee. Do not try and limit yourself with the number of clauses, but aiming to write five Preambulatory and five Operative might seem like a nice place to start. *Amendments can add clauses to or remove clauses from your resolution, or change the wording of an existing clause. Research The research is the most important part of any Model United Nations conference. Before you can go to the conference, before you can even start thinking about what you're going to say and write in a resolution, and definately before you begin planning your outfits, you must do the research. Each committee in the conference will have three or four issues that it will be adressing. You will be able to discover what these are by talking to your advisers or by looking on the conference's web site. You will be concentrating on only one of these issues in your resolution (or one per resolution if you intend to write more than one), but it is advisable to look into all of the issues, particularly any that you feel that you do not know much about initially, because there will be plenty of people in the conference committee rooms and in the debates who will want to talk about these issues and you may feel left out if you don't know anything about them and your country's stance on them. Usually the conferences will publish Briefing Papers to get you started with the various issues. Real life Heads of State and Delegates could not possibly know everything about the things that they have to deal with, so their aides and advisers prepare very similar briefing papers for them so that they are adequately knowledgable about the facts. Also it is a very good idea to research the background of your country thoroughly. It would be terribly embarrasing if another delegate came up with a fact about any problems in your country's past of which you were unaware and as such were not prepared to deal with. Research Questions Some of these questions may be answered by looking at the information that this Wiki has about each country here, but you might have to look further afield. If you find any very useful information that this Wiki does not know about, feel free to add it in! *Where is my country? *Who are my country's neighbours? *Who are my country's political allies and enemies? *What is the population? *What is the average income or GDP? *What are the main imports/exports? *What are the main religions? See this list of useful websites for ideas about where to start your research. Preambulatory Clauses Your research will have inspired you enough to start writing something down. In the Preambulatory Clauses (or Pream) you have the chance to bring a number of things to the attention of the committee. You can let them all know how your country feels about the issue. You can inform them about what has been done in the past to tackle the issue. You can inform them about the major problems that effect any possible solutions. If you discover a problem, you should also try and identify a solution, which belongs in the next section of the resolution. Operative Clauses The Operative Clauses are your chance to propose solutions. If you have researched both your country and your issue properly, than you will be fully prepared to come up with some ideas for things that may not have been tried before. Good Operative clauses set achievable goals and provide good reason for other states to agree with them. As a rule, you might want to consider mentally pairing your Preambulatory Clauses with your Operative Clauses. If you decide upon "Urges state to sign up to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT)..." as an Operative clause, make sure that your concern for the lack of nations who have currently signed the treaty is written down in your Preamble. This will make sure that the rest of the committee know why you want to implement the changes, and it might encourage them to see the seriousnes of the matter that they might otherwise have missed. Category:Help Pages Category:Terminology